Like many I'm sure, I've become addicted to places like Bloglines and memorandum. What really cheeses me is that people are just ripping off what's popular and putting it on there own blog. At the risk of being flamed I am going to pick on Scoble because....well
he is easy to pick on ok. I visit his blog because I know that he is the dude who started the whole channel9 thing and he works at Microsoft. So naturally I'm interested in what goes on in that sphere. If I wanted to know about Google or Sun or whoever, I'd
go visit one of the regular news sites. I can read too you know and despite what my colleagues may think I have also mastered the copy/paste thing. Lets take a step back for a moment...why is it that we blog? Isn't it because we want to share our lives, our
world, our view? Don't we blog because we think that others might be interested in what it is that we do or think? A lot of people are worse, they just link to whatever everyone else has on their blog....wtf? If your going to blog I think your should follow
some lose guidelines:

Blog about what it is that you or your company
does. In the end that is going to be the best news because people aren't going to be able to get it anywhere else.

Don't blog about something in the news or on another blog unless you have something substantial to add to it.

Remember that readers are principally interested in your sphere not someone else's so make your content is as unique to you or your company as possible.

There are news sites and blogs, they are two very different things.

If you've started a blog for the sole purpose of promoting something then I think you've missed the whole blogging thing. Don't get me wrong, blogs will intrinsically generate activity around a product if that is what your blog is about, however that shouldn't
be your focus. We don't want to know how much it costs or what discounts we get for reading about it in a blog, we want to know what it can do and how it does it. We want to know why it was done that way.

I'm sure there are lots more but this will do for now.

I find that the most interesting blogs are those that give me something that I can't find somewhere else. I love reading
Scott's blog because I always learn something that I didn't know before. Those of you out there that are just mindlessly posting to your blogs on topics that 100 other people posted minutes before, I'm sorry to say that we're
not interested. Anyway...just me 2 cents.